The Melancholy Assemblage

Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance

Drew Daniel

This book picks up on two themes that are of great interest at the moment: first, the question of affect, or feeling, and how it may have shifted in the course of history; and second, a rethinking of matter and the material world. The author's interest in materialism is especially inflected by Deleuze, but is also in dialogue with Freud and Benjamin.

The book develops a new analysis of the early modern affect of melancholy as a social matter, one of weak communities of feeling.

The Melancholy Assemblage

Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance

Drew Daniel

Description

This book considers melancholy as an "assemblage," as a network of dynamic, interpretive relationships between persons, bodies, texts, spaces, structures, and things. In doing so, it parts ways with past interpretations of melancholy. Tilting the English Renaissance against the present moment, Daniel argues that the basic disciplinary tension between medicine and philosophy persists within contemporary debates about emotional embodiment.

To make this case, the book binds together the paintings of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, the drama of Shakespeare, the prose of Burton, and the poetry of Milton. Crossing borders and periods, Daniel combines recent theories which have--until now--been regarded as incongruous by their respective advocates.

Asking fundamental questions about how the experience of emotion produces community, the book will be of interest to scholars of early modern literature, psychoanalysis, the affective turn, and continental philosophy.

The Melancholy Assemblage

Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance

Drew Daniel

Reviews and Awards

". . . a powerfully engaging and deeply rewarding study of melancholy in English Renaissance literature."-Graham Hammill, University at Buffalo, SUNY

"In this stimulating, inventive, and moving volume by one of Shakespeare studies' most brilliant and original emerging voices, Drew Daniel uses the history of melancholy in order to map the haptic loops and iconic postures that bind together thinking, feeling, and making in art and life. Along the way he answers questions that really matter, such as how melancholy forges friendships among misanthropes, and why fashion makes us sad."-Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life

"This is an alert and edgy work by a major new voice in Renaissance studies."--Julia Reinhard Lupton, SEL (Recent STudies in Tudor and Stuart Drama)